You’ll find the Le CPR exercise as Activity 2 on the Module 2 Workbook

Lesson 3: LE CPR [transcript]

This exercise is all about exploring different kinds of timelines in your life. We’ve already done the seven-year chunks. This time we’re going to think about what we call LE CPR, which is Location, Education, Career and professional, your Peak achievements, and your Relationships. 

Now bear with us on this because I’m sure that you’re going to find that there are some crossovers with what you’ve written in your seven-year chunks. But that’s kind of the point because the more that something appears, the more important it’s going to be. 

So let’s start with thinking about location. Where are the different places that you’ve lived in your lives? What have been the significance of the kind of moves that you’ve made? Maybe they were for relationship reasons, maybe your parents moved around. But that will have a really profound effect on your life and how things turned out for you.

So that’s why we start with the places that have been important to you, your locations. 

Next we’re going to move on to education. That’s, that’s school, sure, but that’s also university, maybe your professional qualifications afterwards. And again we’re thinking about how those were formative. Maybe you went back to study later in life, those of us in midlife particularly have had all sorts of different experiences, so write about those too, please.

And then we’re also going to think about your career and your professional development. So let’s have the highlights of your career, maybe think about why you went into that, what itches it was scratching for you. 

And then we’ll go into your kind of, what have been your peak achievements in terms of your career, but also other things maybe in your life that you see as a real peak achievement. For me, definitely having my daughters is really up there. 

And then of course that brings us on to relationships. Now that’s not just your partner if you have one, many of us don’t. About 40% of women at this stage don’t have a partner, so don’t feel bad if you don’t. And also maybe children, but not necessarily children. Again, a third of women at midlife life haven’t had kids, particularly the more you, the more highly educated ones, so that’s fine. 

But write about the significant relationships in your life and also how relationships have maybe made you change course or made you shift in a way that you probably wouldn’t have if you hadn’t met that person at that point. That’s going to be really key when we come on to studying patterns. 

So, have a go. Have fun!